Superintendent Sam Houston issued a "y'all come" invitation to the New York studios of the "Today Show" after a segment Thursday morning claimed that Decatur "has bad schools."

Houston sent a letter to "Today Show" officials inviting them to see Decatur's education status. The letter is in response to a statement correspondent Barbara Corcoran made.

In a comparison of $500,000 real estate, she said a buyer could buy a two-bedroom townhouse in a gated community in Tucson, Ariz., or a four-bedroom, 3,800-square-foot house on 111/2 acres with a pond and pool in Decatur. (The home in question is just outside the city limits.)

Corcoran then ended her statement to host Matt Lauer, "What you don't get is good schools. They've got a bad school system. But taxes are only $1,000 a year."

In his letter to "Today Show" Executive Producer Jim Bell, Houston said he was "stunned" to see the segment and that he thinks Corcoran commented incorrectly on his school system.

"You will find a community that values public education and invests in it," Houston writes. "Our teachers and administrators are well trained and highly committed. Our parents are supportive and involved."

Writer-researcher Jennifer Margulis wrote the copy for Corcoran. She told The Daily that she researched Decatur's test scores because the home listing shows it as being in Decatur.

ABC Realty agent Theresa Simon said the Day Road home is not in the city limits. The home is in the Danville schools district in the Morgan County school system.

No. Its code for the reporter and the Today Show staff being militantly ignorant. Its a real outrage, the Today Show did virtually no research about Decatur City Schools. But, somehow the woman reporter felt very comfortable making the statement.

I grew up about 30 miles from Decatur. Most folks frowned on the town...not necessarily a bad place to go...but if you compared against Florence, Huntsville or Athens...Decatur came after them. No one really worked on the infrastructure of the town, and in the 1980s when I last drove through the area...it still looked like 1950 (perhaps not a bad thing). The interesting thing is that housing there still holds steady with a decent house going for $80k and you can own a really great house for $120k.

The only reason Huntsville schools ever frowned on Decatur was the fact Decatur High's football team usually won the unofficial Huntsville City football championship. Decatur City Schools as a whole score much higher than Florence and Huntsville. Athens still beats Decatur. As for it "looking like the 1950"....you obviously haven't been through Athens, the Shoals or Huntsville recently.

On a Monday I would “nationalize” ABC, CBS and NBC. By Wednesday each would have a new board of directors and have picked, out of a hat, one of three cities to which to relocate their headquarters and their HQ-network studios (morning shows and nightly news), of either Chicago, Dallas or Atlanta. On Friday morning each would be resold to the public as new IPOs, recouping the four day cost of “nationalizing” them. Maybe we-d actually start to have “national” broadcast networks, instead of north-east liberal-orthodoxy networks.

A quick web search showed two high schools in the city system, one about 60% white, one about 61%. (33 and 31% Black, respectively). They both did pretty well on the standard state test. Tucson Unified has much higer minority percentages. So I don’t think the network was trying to use racial code words.

The Arizona schools do seem to lag on on the standardized tests, so it looks like the folks in Alabama have a legitimate complaint.

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